Introduction to Energy Usage
With climate change being one of the most pressing issues of our generation, finding ways to combat this enormous problem is going to require a bunch of system level changes all happening at the same time in order to mitigate the negative effects. Currently one of the biggest transformations that is going to be required to reduce the total amount of carbon emissions, especially here within the United States, is finding a way to transition the country towards renewable energy and cutting back on fossil fuels.
While the country has been slowly adopting more and more renewable energy types over the past couple of decades, this transition is happening very slowly and varies heavily from state to state. By performing a deeper analysis on a state by state level of the types of energy stations that are present, how much CO2 each state emits, and how much energy each state consumes and produces, we can use these insights to inform policy decisions and find areas that could be used to expand the production of different renewable energy types.
Our Questions
renewables2
By building off our mid semester project, we wanted to advance our work and look closer at the distribution of different energy production types and the amount of energy they produce in relation to CO2 production.Ultimately through our different visualizations we are hoping to be able to answer questions such as how can identifying locations and outputs of renewable energy decisions influence policy decisions? How can the insights we find lead to reducing Co2 emissions within different states? What sorts of renewable energies are already present within different states and how can that help lead to what sorts of renewable energies get adopted in the future? How has the adoption of renewable and nonrenewable energies changed overtime? Understanding how different energy types are used and produced in different states would provide useful information to policy makers and energy companies in helping them figure out the best way to use their time and resources.
Data
To answer these questions, we collected data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA has data that spans from before 1960 all the way to 2021, but the data we most wanted to focus on was for power plants in the US, of which only data from 2018 was available. We were able to find data on power plant location and generation capacity for the major renewable and nonrenewable energy sources including wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Included was information on carbon dioxide emissions by state and per capita, as well as energy consumption by state.
Energy Usage Statistics
Leaflet Plots
Wind Plot
Coal Plot
Nuclear Plot
Leaflet Results
From the leaflet maps above, we can start to get an understanding of where exactly different types of energy stations are located within the United States. While the above plots are just three examples taken from the Shiny App we created, in the Shiny App itself one has the ability to choose the energy type they are interested in, or even choose multiple energy types at the same time. These maps are interactive and one can zoom into any particular state or location, and a user can also click on any individual symbol and get the name of the plant, the exact location, and how much energy that plant produces. Also shown in the shiny app is higher level state summary information. The user has the ability to pick any particular state they are interested in and can see how much energy is generated by the different energy types within the state, and also how many of the different plants are currently within the state.
In particular if we analyze just these three plots above, we can start to see how when looking at the first plot of wind stations within the US, that there is a high number concentrated in the Midwest region but not many exist within the South. When looking at the Coal plot, we can start to see how coal plants are heavily located within Rust Belt region, and that there are not many coal plants on the West Coast. Finally when looking at the Nuclear plot, we can see that overall there is much lower number of nuclear plots within the United States and the ones that are currently running are located primarily along the East Coast. While the Shiny App can offer us even further indepth analysis when combining the leaflet plots with the summary tables, these are just a few of the high level insights we can gain from the plots alone.
Link to Shiny App
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